Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Regarding the fall of former New
York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, few people are asking this question:
why did the women put up with his behavior? The New Yorker described his
girlfriends as “articulate, progressive Democratic feminists in their forties
who live in Manhattan."

What is it about articulate,
progressive Democratic feminists that makes them accept being treated the way
Eric Schneiderman treated them? We are not talking about one-night-stands. We
are talking about women who sustained long term relationships. And who thought
of themselves as progressive feminists.

Has their feminism denuded them of
their self-respect? Did they think that he was a good catch, a rising political
star, one who would provide entry into higher social circles? Did they think that they were sacrificing themselves for the cause?

He drank excessively, took prescription anxiolytics, beat
them, slapped them and threatened to kill them.

One woman explained to The New Yorker:

I would
come over for dinner. An already half-empty bottle of red wine would be on the
counter. He had had a head start. ‘Very stressful day,’ he would say.”
Sometimes, if she didn’t drink quickly enough, she says, he would “come to me
like a baby who wouldn’t eat its food, and hold the glass to my lips while
holding my face, and sweetly but forcefully, like a parent, say, ‘Come on, Mimi, drink, drink, drink,’
and essentially force me - at times actually spilling it down my chin and onto
my chest.” Schneiderman, she recalls, “would
almost always drink two bottles of wine in a night, then bring a bottle of
Scotch into the bedroom. He would get absolutely plastered five nights
out of seven.” On one occasion, she recalls, “he literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down, like a tree
falling.” Another evening, he smashed his leg against an open drawer,
cutting it so badly that “there was blood all over the place.” She bandaged it,
but the next day she went to his office to change the dressing, because the
bleeding hadn’t stopped.

Why woulda
progressive New York feminist stay with a man who treated her that way?

Another woman, Tanya Selvaratnam explained that he would
slap her around.

“The
slaps started after we’d gotten to know each other,” she recalls. “It was at
first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder.” Selvaratnam
says, “It wasn’t consensual. This
wasn’t sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior.”

And also:

When
Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands. “He was obsessed with having a threesome, and
said it was my job to find a woman,” she says. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit
me until I agreed.” (She had no intention of having a threesome.) She
recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to
call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.” Selvaratnam, who was
born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin, and she recalls that “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that
I was ‘his property.’ ”

Schneiderman
"not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back
and forth, with his open hand; he
also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually,
she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.”

Think about it. Only on rare occasions did their sex not
involve him beating her. You can ask why it took so long for her to come forth,
but still, you have to wonder why she put up with it at all. How is it possible, after decades worth of denouncing male sexual predators, that these liberated women allowed themselves to be the victim of one of them.

3 comments:

Perhaps they liked it? They enjoyed the degradation? There is the old stereotype that powerful Fortune 500 CEOs go to dominatrixes in order to be able to give up control. Perhaps it is something along those lines. I've had romantic dalliances with a few women that could be described similarly to the women in this piece. While my experiences don't approach this level in any way, I have noticed that the more dominant and firm I was in my dealings with these women, the more they would just melt and almost luxuriate in their submissiveness.

The hints come in the category rejections, representing the possibility it could be consensual.Tanya Selvaratnam: "It wasn’t consensual. This wasn’t sexual playacting."

Surprisingly, I've only heard the term S&M from married couples. This "playacting" where both partners to alternate passive or dominant.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM

It sounds like he was attracted to stronger women who could stand up to him. (We might consider the real bullies as men who pick weaker women who won't fight back and who don't show abusive behavior until after marriage.) But his lack of self awareness is bizarre, that he couldn't see any boundary on his behavior - I suppose that's what drugs and alcohol are for.